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Greville Wynne, crew-cut and gaunt, arrived at Northolt airport in London on 22 April 1964 to a waiting press. ‘WYNNE HOME’ declared the front page of the Evening Times, and most British newspapers ran similar headlines. The Express, which had covered his arrest, trial and imprisonment in exhaustive detail, had the first interview with the ‘man who came in from the cold’. He revealed over a cup of tea, scones and seed cake in his Chelsea home that he had celebrated his first night of freedom with a small celebration, a bath and then ‘late to bed’.
After treatment at a hospital in Westminster, Wynne went on a Caribbean cruise with his wife. But memories of the Lubyanka preyed on his mind, and he found it difficult to adjust to life after the Penkovsky operation. His name had repeatedly appeared in the world’s press as a spy, and he had been imprisoned for it: as a result, his business career was essentially over, as nobody would believe he was genuine. His own company dropped him, and he and Sheila eventually divorced. A second marriage also failed, amid allegations of cruelty in the press.
But Wynne had been involved in one of the most famous espionage operations of the era, and realised he had something to sell. In 1964, his story was serialised in the Sunday Telegraph in Britain and in the US by the Chicago Tribune. It told much the same story as he had done at the trial, of a plucky innocent unknowingly sucked into a sordid espionage operation.
He wasn’t the only one to tell his story. The idea that history is written by the victors doesn’t apply in the world of espionage: there are rarely clear-cut winners in the spy game, and the defeated usually write books claiming that, secretly, they won all along. Even massive operational failures can be presented as ingenious double bluffs, triple crosses or deception operations, and in presenting such theories the hope is that at least some doubts will be sown. Such attempts sometimes succeed in muddying the waters enough to become more believed than the truth.
Journalist Chapman Pincher called it ‘the Iceberg War’: the submerged battle of disinformation between East and West. The Soviets’ main attempt to influence public perception of the operation was the trial, which was covered by newspapers and television around the world. It was remarkably effective. Many newspapers in the West condemned the Russians’ decision to stage a ‘show trial’, yet reported every sensationalistic claim made in it. When the prosecutor wheeled out a witness to testify he’d once seen Penkovsky sipping wine from a woman’s shoe at a restaurant in order to demonstrate how degraded he had become by his lust for the capitalistic lifestyle, instead of disregarding this as obvious anti-Western propaganda the press lapped it up. The result was that in the West Penkovsky was not regarded as having been a major agent who had provided crucial intelligence, but as a venal Russian sneaking through the back alleys and lining his own pockets.
Irritated that such a triumph had been undermined by Soviet propaganda, the CIA, after much discussion with MI6, decided to hit back by producing a book about the operation. Just as the KGB had its ‘Department D’, the CIA had a clandestine hand in publishing, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which sponsored the magazine Encounter, and via other arm’s-length means. Using the transcripts of Penkovsky’s debriefings as a basis, a narrative was crafted that was broadly accurate, but which sanitised, sensationalised, omitted and altered various elements of the story.
The Penkovsky Papers was published in 1965, and was presented as Penkovsky’s secret diaries, smuggled out of the Soviet Union shortly before his execution. It quickly became an international bestseller. In Britain, the Observer serialised it with a grim illustration of a firing squad by Raymond Hawkey, who had designed jackets for several of Len Deighton and Ian Fleming’s novels: it was the height of 1960s spy fever.
The book was hugely controversial. As Chapman Pincher pointed out in the Express, it broke ‘the only rule of espionage’: with the exception of trials and exchanges, both sides avoided publicising the names of opposition agents whenever possible. The Russians had named several British and American intelligence officers at the trial, but in retaliation The Penkovsky Papers named 700 Soviets involved in intelligence work, including senior KGB and GRU officers. It also, somewhat bizarrely, published the names of CIA and MI6 officers, including the Chisholms, the Cowells, Felicity Stuart, William Jones, Hugh Montgomery, Dick Jacob and Alexis Davison. This may have been to avoid accusations that the book was CIA propaganda, but instead it caused further embarrassment, and some in MI6 were furious that the book revealed so much about its own agents and techniques.
The strategy also backfired. Claims that the book was a CIA forgery emerged at once. The Guardian, not then a sister paper of the Observer, launched an investigation into the book’s authenticity, and other newspapers soon joined the fray. The Express obtained an interview in Moscow with Penkovsky’s wife Vera, who said the book couldn’t possibly be her husband’s diaries and even posed for a photograph opening the secret compartment in his desk. She said he was vain, conceited, and had grown colder over the years of their marriage. One day, he had left for the office, ‘and he never came back’ – she had not attended the trial. All of this was no doubt true – the book wasn’t his diary, and Penkovsky was vain and conceited – but the wife of a recently executed Soviet traitor was in no position to say anything else: the KGB wouldn’t have looked kindly on her or her children had she told the foreign press that the diaries were genuine, let alone presented her husband in a positive light.
The Soviets denounced the book as a hoax at every opportunity, and also took retaliatory measures: the Washington Post’s Moscow correspondent was given a week to leave the Soviet Union as a result of his newspaper having serialised the book, the Observer faced repeated problems with visas to the Soviet Union, and British and American military attachés in the city had travel privileges revoked.
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Despite its sales, The Penkovsky Papers was in many ways a propaganda disaster: the controversy over the book’s authenticity overshadowed its story of the operation’s success.
To make matters worse, some within British and American intelligence had themselves changed their minds about the worth of the operation. It was becoming increasingly obvious that the Russians had several agents-in-place in Britain, France and the United States. KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn, emboldened by the trust senior CIA officers had in him, now declared that Penkovsky must have been under Soviet control all along. He pointed out that the American Embassy in Moscow was littered with bugs, which he claimed meant the KGB would have been able to monitor Penkovsky’s debriefings there. Penkovsky had in fact never entered the American Embassy in Moscow – he had even warned the team that the embassy was bugged, and told them that all Soviet staff working in foreign embassies were KGB informers. But Golitsyn’s insistence that Penkovsky must have been forced by the Soviets to deliver selected documents to the West gathered support within British and American counter-intelligence circles.
One element about the operation was particularly troubling: there was no firm evidence for when and how Penkovsky had been detected. The only explanation for it had been provided by Yuri Nosenko, who had claimed the KGB had spotted him accidentally while conducting routine surveillance of Janet Chisholm. This chimed with Penkovsky’s report that he had seen surveillance after a meeting with Janet in January 1962 – the man in the black overcoat – but was that really the first the KGB had known about the operation?
The fact that Nosenko was the source for this didn’t help. On his arrival in the United States in 1964, BARMAN’s responses to the CIA’s questions about Lee Harvey Oswald and other matters had proven ‘evasive and inconsistent’, and Pete Bagley had concluded he was a plant, perhaps sent to feed false information about the Kennedy assassination. In what remains one of the CIA’s most controversial decisions, Nosenko was imprisoned, first in an attic in a safe house in Washington, and then in a purpose-built cell at the CIA’s training facility, Camp Peary, in Virginia. But Nosenko didn’t crack, and maintained that he was a genuine defector.
In 1967, the CIA released Nosenko and tried again. Questioned in gentler environs, he continued to insist he was genuine, but admitted he had made a ‘false statement’ relating to his defection. But was it his only lie? What if he had also lied about the way Penkovsky had been caught?
The inconsistencies in Nosenko’s story looked all the more troubling when set against other events. In May 1963, Jack Dunlap, a clerk at the National Security Agency, had his security clearance revoked under suspicion he was a Soviet agent. He committed suicide two months later. A subsequent search of his home revealed some of the lower-level documents that had emanated from Penkovsky, attributed to ‘a reliable Soviet source’. The following year it was discovered that Robert Lee Johnson, a guard at a courier centre for US Army and Air Force bases near Paris, was also working for the KGB. A third American discovered to be working for the Soviets in this period was William Whalen, a retired lieutenant-colonel in the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had access to the Pentagon as late as 1963.
The situation was no better in Britain. In 1962, an Admiralty clerk, John Vassall, had been arrested and charged with espionage, but while he admitted to having worked with Soviet intelligence his confession didn’t seem to account for all the documents that had been stolen. Three years later, Frank Bossard, an engineer at the Ministry of Aviation’s Guided Weapons Research and Development Division, was arrested in London. Bossard had a drinking problem and heavy debts, and had been easily recruited by the Russians. In return for payment, Bossard regularly placed classified documents in dead drops around London. He was arrested with a suitcase containing four secret Ministry of Aviation files about guided missiles, but it was impossible to know what other documents he had given the Soviets, or even precisely when he had started working for them – he claimed it had been July 1961, but it could have been earlier.
Any of these men might have tipped off the Soviets that intelligence was being leaked from Moscow. None of them could have known the identity of the source, but as soon as the KGB realised there was a mole, officers would have been assigned to try to narrow the field of suspects, just as Harry Shergold had done with the information from Michael Goleniewski to find Blake.
Within the intelligence community – and in MI5 in particular – some became intensely concerned about the extent of Soviet penetration: had all or almost all of the spies now been discovered, or was it possible that this was the tip of an iceberg, and that the Russians had dozens, or perhaps even hundreds, of agents and assets buried within the West? In this climate, the Penkovsky operation suddenly looked too good to be true, especially the remarkable coincidence of a Soviet source appearing with such an unprecedented amount of high-grade military intelligence about Berlin and Cuba just as both were needed.
MI5 officer Peter Wright, who had played an incidental role in the Penkovsky operation in fitting the microphones in the Mount Royal Hotel, became one of the leading proponents of the theory that British intelligence was the target of massive Soviet penetration and disinformation attempts. MI5’s molehunt eventually led to the surveillance of Roger Hollis, the head of the agency, and Graham Mitchell, its deputy head. But if either Hollis or Mitchell had been a traitor, why had they not informed the KGB about Oleg Penkovsky much earlier? Both had been told his identity in May 1961. The answer, according to Wright and others within MI5, must have been that they – or someone else – did tell the KGB, and that Penkovsky had been under Soviet control for almost all of the operation.
In 1987, Wright, angry with MI5 in a dispute over his pension, found an Australian publisher for his memoir, titled Spycatcher. Written with ITV reporter Paul Greengrass – now better known as a director of Hollywood films – the book was explosive. Initially banned in England, it quickly became an international bestseller.
One of Wright’s claims in Spycatcher, which he’d also made in a pamphlet a few years earlier and via interviews with Chapman Pincher as well as during his time at MI5, was that Penkovsky could have been a ‘disinformation agent’, sent by the Russians to feed specific messages to the West. Wright’s theory was that the Soviets were desperate to convince the West that they lagged behind in missile strength and development, and that once Penkovsky had provided this information Khrushchev had achieved his ‘major aim’: forcing Kennedy into an assurance he wouldn’t invade Cuba.
Wright’s theories hadn’t been well received by his peers: he revealed that when he had suggested at a meeting with MI6 that Penkovsky had been a plant, Harry Shergold had gone for him: ‘“What the hell do you know about running agents?” he snarled. “You come in here and insult a brave man’s memory, and expect us to believe this?”’
Spycatcher has sold over two million copies, and many of Wright’s claims have appeared in subsequent books, articles and documentaries. But it is now clear that many of his claims about Penkovsky were based on incomplete knowledge of the operation. He stated, for example, that some of Penkovsky’s most important documents were shown to him by his uncle, and that he was debriefed within the American Embassy in Moscow, neither of which is the case. He also claimed that there were suspicious gaps in Penkovsky’s material, but in 1992 the CIA granted two authors, Jerrold Schecter and Peter Deriabin, access to thousands of files about the operation for a book, The Spy Who Saved the World, and shortly after its publication declassified almost all of these documents. The scope and quality of the material Penkovsky handed over make it undeniable that this was the West’s greatest intelligence haul of the Cold War. It also came at a crucial time, and played a key role during the missile crisis: Sidney Graybeal, the chief of the CIA’s Guided Missile Division, has said that in answering questions from President Kennedy and his advisers about the missiles he had relied ‘primarily on the combination of intelligence sources, but mainly Penkovsky’s information, which told us how these missiles operated in the field’ – this included precise details of how the missiles were moved, erected and fuelled, and explained that such preparations took several hours. The CIA’s chief analyst during the missile crisis, Ray Cline, has stated that Penkovsky’s intelligence was vital, as it allowed the agency to ‘follow the progress of Soviet missile emplacement in Cuba by the hour’. Dick Helms has also said that without Penkovsky’s intelligence the photographs could not have been evaluated in such detail, and that the ‘precise capabilities of the SS-4 MRBM and other missiles could not have been made known to the President’.
Wright’s theory that Penkovsky could have been part of a ploy by Khrushchev to take the world to the brink of nuclear war to stop the Americans from invading Cuba doesn’t hold water, either. A mass of evidence testifies to the fact that the Soviets were significantly behind in missile strength, and choosing to reveal this to the West would have been extremely foolhardy on their part, not least because hawks in the US might have ordered a preemptive strike as a result. The GRU had even told Khrushchev that the Pentagon had abandoned a planned nuclear attack in the autumn of 1961 because of their fears that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was more powerful than they had thought – this wasn’t in fact the case, but if the Russians had wanted to dissuade the US from considering a nuclear strike, it would have made much more sense for a disinformation agent to claim that their missile strength was greater than they believed, not weaker. A plan to use Penkovsky to trigger a retreat over Cuba would also have been illogical: in fact, General Curtis LeMay argued vociferously for invading the island, but was overruled by Kennedy.
In the feverish interest surrounding the British government’s banning of Spycatcher, many swallowed Peter Wright’s conspiracy theories whole – ironically, all the triumphs of the Penkovsky operation were undermined, not by the KGB, but by one embittered British intelligence officer who clearly hadn’t even read the debriefs.